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1.05.2012

Symbol World: Symbol Based News for Kids & Adults

If you like News2You, you will love SymbolWorld! "SymbolWorld is a website created by Widgit Software specifically for symbol users. It has material for all ages and includes news, personal contributions, stories and learning materials." (http://www.symbolworld.org/)

Features of this, FREE, web-based program are:

easy navigatation, with the option to personalize the layout and colors to suit any reader's needs

you can create user accounts, allowing you to save style settings, access the "Print Friendly PDFs" feature, rate articles and sign up for email notifications

all links have visual highlights (i.e., a colored border to show where you are on the page) to make the site more accessible for people using switches or who use the Tab key to browse

at the bottom of every article is a ‘Print Friendly’ button, which will create a print friendly PDF of the entire article for you to save or print directly from your browser

Speech/Voice Output is currently not available on SymbolWorld :(. But they are working on this feature for the near future! The current, non-speech version of SymbolWorld does not require Flash, which means you can view ALL of the features of the site on your iDevice. I was actually able to use the VoiceOver feature on my iPad to select the text on each news page and have it read aloud. I was also able to touch each word in the article to have the VoiceOver engine read each word aloud one at a time. This could be a great literacy building tool for early level readers! The fact that you can print each symbol-based news story to a PDF file gives you some flexibility with regard to speech output. If your child is currently using an electronic reading program like Kurzwell , the PDFs from SymbolWorld could be loaded and read through that or other PDF reader programs. I can even think of some ways to make this happen on iPad…:) Want to know more about that? :)